


A Shop of Secrets

by blythechild



Series: Gift Fics 2015 [2]
Category: Forever (TV)
Genre: Crack, Families of Choice, Gen, Humor, POV Outsider, Resurrection, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 12:16:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5496749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry and Abe discover a mouse in the shop...</p><p> </p><p>This is a work of fanfiction and as such I do not claim ownership over the characters herein. It was created as a personal amusement. This story is suitable for all audiences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Shop of Secrets

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gift story for thesmallhobbit who left the following prompt: _Henry & Abe, there's a mouse in the shop._ Merry Christmas, blossom!

Phineas had a wonderful life. He lived in an antique shop on the corner of East 12th Street and Avenue B in Manhattan where it was always warm and dry, and it was also blessedly free of cats and terriers which meant that it was quite safe as well. A mouse could do far worse. The shop was filled with beautiful things that provided plenty of places to hide or curl up comfortably for a quiet nap, and the things were constantly moving around and changing so Phineas always had something new to explore. The shop was clean, which isn’t so important to mice, except that it meant that Phineas was also quite clean too and somewhere along the way cleanliness had become important to him. The happy exception to the cleanliness rule lay in the apartment beyond the shop. The shop owner, Abe, while fastidious about his storefront, was slightly less so about his living space. This was fine by Phineas as Abe was a good cook, which meant that there were plenty of cheese crumbs, prosciutto scraps, or bowls of half-finished homemade stew to sample. Yes, Phineas lived and ate well in the little shop, and he was grateful as only a mouse could be.

But Phineas had a secret. Well, _two secrets_ actually. He was no ordinary mouse and his extraordinariness was directly linked to the antique shop. When he’d first found it, he’d been an average, slightly bedraggled brown mouse the likes with which New York City was positively teeming. He had been so hungry in those first few weeks that he’d run around every inch of the place and gorged himself on whatever he could find never knowing if it were his last meal or not. The shop, too, had a secret: below the store and apartment was something that Abe called ‘the lab’, although he never used it. The lab belonged to Abe’s odd friend, Henry, and Henry was a part of both the shop’s and Phineas’s secret. There was something strange about Henry - he always made Phineas’s nose twitch - and if Phineas had been a smarter mouse he would’ve stayed out of the man’s lab. But mice are adventurous by nature, so maybe that was never a realistic expectation. 

Anyway, one night Phineas was exploring the lab when he smelled blood. Now, blood is a good sign because it usually means something fresh and dead and possibly delicious was just around the corner waiting for a mouse to happen upon it. And since Phineas was still running around obsessively eating anything he could find, he followed the smell. But when Phineas found the source of the blood it wasn’t from something meaty and edible, it was in a thin, glass tube amongst a lot of other inedible, boring stuff. Nevertheless, Phineas gave the blood a shot, and that’s where his story took a turn.

The blood tasted weird and made him feel tingly from his whiskers through to the tip of his tail. Right then and there Phineas decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble. However, at that same moment, he was discovered. Henry was standing over him, a look of horror on his face and with one of his shoes in his hand. And then everything went black.

Phineas awoke later, in the kitchen sink, and with a terrible headache. He had no idea how he got there and since he was sure that he’d been hit by a shoe, that should’ve been the end of him. And yet, he lived. He wandered back to his nest in the shop and counted his blessings.

But then it kept happening.

Henry convinced Abe to put out traps in the store and while a New York mouse is by necessity fairly trap-savvy, Abe laced them with the most exquisite smoked gouda and, alas, it was Phineas’s undoing. SNAP! Phineas awoke again in the kitchen sink, this time with a kinked tail for his trouble. Then there was the poison-laced pancetta, the terrible sticky pads, and the deceptively inhospitable ‘mouse hotel’. Every adventure ended in blackness and then waking up in Abe’s kitchen sink. He should’ve been dead several times over; Phineas was at a loss to explain it. 

Then one night Phineas stumbled onto a clue. It was late when the door to the shop slammed open making the chime ring too violently. A shadow stumbled in, looking very unsteady as it locked the front door and then sank to its knees heavily. Phineas peered from his mouse hole - visitors to the store were usually much quieter and generally only came out in daylight. The shadow called out for Abe, and after some thumping and swearing, Abe appeared armed with a flashlight and what appeared to be some sort of bowling trophy.

“Who’s there?! I have a gun!” Abe growled.

“No, you don’t, Abraham,” the shadow wheezed.

“Henry? What did you do?”

Abe rushed to Henry and bent next to him. In the flashlight’s glow, Phineas could see blood, lots of it.

“Did you go investigating without Martinez again?” Abe scolded. “She’s so pretty - and armed - I don’t know why you keep ditching her…”

“No, this was a good, old fashioned New York mugging, I’m afraid,” Henry gasped as he moved his hand over his wound. Even at a distance, Phineas could smell how much blood was there - Henry was done for. Phineas suddenly felt bad for Abe. Losing his friend would be hard on him; they didn’t appear to have much other than one another.

“Listen,” Henry grabbed Abe’s shirt. “It’s going to happen. Just a few minutes now… I needed to get home to tell you. Get the car and meet me - it’s too cold tonight to stand around on the shore soaked to the skin for too long.”

“Okay,” Abe said quietly and held Henry as he bled out. 

Within a few minutes, Henry went quiet and limp, and then suddenly _disappeared_. Phineas sat straight up in his mouse hole, every inch of his furry frame tingling. Humans were very strange but as far as he knew they couldn’t disappear. He expected Abe to be upset but he just got to his feet and began to rush around the shop collecting things into a bag.

“I’ll never get used to that,” was all he said before leaving. Phineas had to agree with him.

Forty-five minutes later Abe returned with a wet and shaking Henry wrapped in a blanket. He seemed completely normal until he dropped the blanket and Phineas got a good look at his side. There was no wound, no blood, nothing but smooth skin. The two men cleaned up the shop and then went to bed as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.

Phineas sat up and pondered it all. He may not have been exceptionally smart, but he was very practical, and it seemed to him that if _he_ could avoid death more than once, then perhaps Henry could as well. It shouldn’t have been possible and yet they both kept coming back. Reason didn’t have much to do with reality in Phineas’s limited experience. He wished that he could talk to Henry, to let him know that they had the same secret, but he didn’t speak human and humans tended to throw shoes at mice anyway. It wasn’t a promising dynamic. But then Phineas realized that _he couldn’t die_ , it didn’t matter how many shoes Henry threw at him. He’d just keep putting himself in Henry’s path until he got the message. After all, communicating with a human couldn’t be less probable than sharing his secret to everlasting life, could it?

Phineas’s plan took some doing and there were a few more deaths along the way (smashed by a garbage can, swatted repeatedly with a broom in the bathtub, and once, insultingly lifted by his tail and tossed from a second storey window), but eventually he prevailed. It happened the night that he marched boldly out to the center of the dining room table as Abe had espresso and Henry did the crossword. Henry folded over his paper and peered at Phineas.

“Dear lord, another mouse. We must be infested.”

Abe looked up and then to Phineas on the table. “Wow, this one’s got balls all right. Look at him…” Abe peered a little closer and then his eyebrows rose. “Hey, I don’t think this is a new one. I’m sure I killed this one last week.”

“Abraham, don’t be ridiculous. You can’t tell them apart - they’re mice.”

“That’s racist. Or speciesist, or something.” Abe leaned in further. “I’m not kidding, Henry, I got this guy last week. I remember the bent tail. And he was dead as a doornail too, I swear.”

Now Henry leaned in and squinted. Phineas stood on his back legs making himself as tall and splendidly mouselike as he could. His body tingled as Henry focused on him. This was going to work this time - he was sure of it. Henry’s eyes suddenly widened and he dropped his paper to the floor.

“Oh no…”

“What?” Abe asked.

“He has a white patch on his left ear…” Henry mumbled.

“Yeah, so?”

“I killed this mouse six mouths ago in my lab.”

“Wait… what?”

“With my shoe.”

“Well, that’s… horrible. But what are you saying?”

“I killed him because he was sniffing around my test samples.” Henry braced his face with both hands and stared at Phineas. “I was upset he had contaminated them. I had to draw new blood, take new hair and skin scrapings… a whole new set…”

“ _Your_ blood?” Abe stared accusingly at Henry. “He got into _your_ blood samples? Jesus, Henry, did you immortalize a mouse?!?”

That snapped Henry’s gaze to Abe. “Immortalize isn’t correct in this context.”

“If you’ve got a better term for actively undeading something, be my guest.”

“I don’t,” Henry huffed and then sank back into his chair looking at Phineas once more.

“Well, I guess this means that we should stop trying to kill him. Now that’s he’s family an’ all…”

Henry shot Abe a disbelieving look.

“He’s a mouse hopped up on your blood, Dad. Like it or not, he’s one of us.”

Dad? Phineas looked to Henry, back to Abe, and then to Henry once more. Oh my.

“Look… it’s almost like he understands what we’re saying,” Abe chuckled. “He’s kinda cute.”

Phineas wished that he had eyebrows to arch at Abe, but he’d settle for not being bashed with blunt objects anymore. 

“Well, at the very least, endeavoring to kill him is pointless. And since he keeps hanging around the shop, I suppose that we should just get used to him.” 

Henry steepled his fingers in front of him as he stared. Phineas found his manner to be ungrateful in the extreme, considering the lengths he’d gone to in order to establish this moment, and he told him so as vociferously as he could. Unfortunately, to anyone other than a mouse, his excoriation just looked like a violent sneeze. Abe laughed loudly and called him ‘cute’ again. Phineas squeaked in frustration and wandered off in search of some kitchen scraps. _Humans._

In time, being the undead mouse who shared a secret with two equally shifty and secretive humans paid off. Abe, who was a soft touch, began to leave food out on purpose for Phineas and occasionally referred to him as ‘brother’, but only when Henry was within in earshot and could roll his eyes at him. If Phineas happened to inconveniently fall asleep somewhere in the shop, Abe would gently (and discreetly) cup him in his hands and find a less obvious spot in or on something that presumably no one was likely to buy. It was a vast improvement over being chased hysterically with a broom. Abe even let Phineas sleep on top of his speakers when he played his jazz records. It was quite soothing.

Henry came around eventually. Phineas was even allowed down in the lab again so long as he didn’t mess with Henry’s ‘samples’. Henry would spend his evenings peering at things with bigger, weirder-looking things and then writing about what he saw in a journal. Sometimes Abe would bring him something to eat, which he often ignored, so Phineas would help himself because whatever Abe brought was always wonderful. When Henry noticed this, he started sharing his meals. He absently fed Phineas a nibble here and a bite there while mumbling that after two hundred years he knew as much about his condition as Phineas did. The thought seemed to upset Henry so Phineas did his best to let him know that he thought Henry was the smartest (albeit weird and occasionally violent) human he’d come across and that surely it was just a matter of time until he solved the question. And he and Henry had nothing but time, didn’t they? Phineas sat up on his back legs and wiggled his whiskers as convincingly as he could. Henry just smiled and gave him a little scratch under his chin; Phineas wasn’t sure that Henry understood him but the détente was made and Phineas was satisfied with that. From then on, whenever Henry was in his lab, Phineas was there too - for moral support. It seemed as though he’d finally found his purpose in life. Humans were so fragile in their accomplishments - there was a lot they could learn from mice on that score.

So that was Phineas’s secret. And the shop’s secret, and also Henry’s secret. Despite the possibility that he’d live until the end of the world, Phineas was very glad that he’d come across the little antiques shop. He felt like a very important mouse, sitting on Henry’s shoulder while he worked in the lab, or listening to Abe warble Italian opera while he concocted something new and scrumptious in the kitchen. He had a family now and, strange though they were, they made him happy and thankful as only a lost little mouse could be.


End file.
